Ifa Reist, Lee Moser and Tal Kelman - Venture and General Partners at Protego Ventures

Ifa, Lee and Tal invited me to moderate a panel discussion around European Defense in Munich last week. They were doing a little roadshow for the first private Israeli defense venture fund. As former diplomats and 2nd in charge of the IDF Airforce, there were some good discussions in the room.

🚀 Companies

MagnetFab - High-precision Micromagnets

Status: Grant funded

Source: CAVI

Founders: Milan, Abdellatif

Why it’s cool:

Provider of high-performance micromagnets for semiconductor and microelectronics applications. Manufactures wafer-integrated permanent micromagnets at microscale for MEMS devices, biomagnetic sensors, and quantum computing components.

Voltrac - Autonomous, electric tractors

Status: Pre-Seed

Source: Network

Founders: Fran and Tom

Why it’s cool:

Fran and Tom are not part of the Inflection portfolio, but we are big fans of them and their work since 1y+. Fran built cruise missiles and hypersonics at Destinus previously, while Tom co-founded Extropic, the AI chip company out of SF.

With Voltrac they are rethinking how to build large, electrified autonomous ground vehicles, from the drive train upwards. One important impact of their platform, not covered as much in the publicity they received recently through The Next Web, is the potential impact on the battlefield of the future. With our investment in Ark Robotics, we’ve observed first-hand the impact of UGVs in Ukraine, and specifically the coordination of all kinds of autonomous systems on modern warfare. Ground robots have a very important place there. Just today, I was in Prague at our 10th European Defense Tech Hackathon in 11 months, and I spoke to a medic from the Ukrainian frontlines who said they have to use UGVs for medical evacuations and casualty evacuations because the front is controlled by Russian drones. ItIt’s too dangerous to send an ambulance or any type of personnel to retrieve the wounded, as the Russians specifically go after any medical support in order to increase their own lethality. This in itself is a violation of the Geneva convention, by the way. In Ukraine, they’re being modified according to needs, with brigade-level engineering teams welding and re-programming according to the mission needs. In the future, once we have a robust supply chain of crystalized designs that make sense, we’ll likely see modular platforms, similar to how modern car manufacturers have a “vehicle platform” that they share across models and brands. E.g., MQB (Modularer Querbaukasten) is one used by Volkswagen Golf, Škoda Octavia, Seat Leon, and Audi A3. One can vary wheelbase, track widths, and body style while maintaining the same mounting points.

Talking shortly about the difficulties of building useful UGVs, they need to be versatile, incredibly robust and modifiable. The versatility means having one platform that can be used for multiple use cases, in terms of range, conditions like mud, snow, low/high temperatures, etc.. Specifically for Europe, that means being able to handle Arctic conditions (-40 C and snow/ice) in the north as well as muddy swamps or rocky hills. Not necessarily all in one configuration, but at least it should be clear what conditions requires which adjustments. On the software side, we need everything from the mission planner to the world understanding and action planning to work, long-term. Short-term, it might be enough to have a robust enough fiber optic cable system for UGVs so that they can be operated in EW-denied environments.

With Voltrac, I think we’re seeing the early signs of the next generation of APCs, IFVs, maybe even main battle tanks, and certainly recovery and support vehicles. The simplicity of the components make sense, the approach to the software makes sense. Autonomy will come, Tom has worked on it most of his career. We just need to incorporate the feedback loops with military.

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[REDACTED] - Brain organoid replacement

Status: Seed

Source: CAVI

Founders: [REDACTED]

Why it’s cool:

Growing brain organoids is difficult but could be very useful for replacing damaged parts of the brain, disease modeling, or just studying how the brain develops. Long-term, we might even be able to copy-paste our brain structures.

💡 Ideas & Science

How Big Things Get Done

Big projects go over budget and time almost always. It’s insane. Especially nuclear power plants, nuclear decommissioning projects and rail projects. Big solar, wind and road projects are modular and thus are easier to estimate, plan and execute. There’s an amazing researcher, Bent Flyvberg, who built up a data base of BIG projects globally to study them. One could argue a startup is a big project, or it should be at least…

Praha byla centrem inovací v obranném systému. Hlavní roli sehrály drony

I also don’t know what that means, but it’s what Czech media had to say about our most recent hackathon. Please check out the video to see a dubbed version of me speaking Czech! The other Czech TV-channel, CNN Prima and Czech Reuters picked up the story too.

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🤼 People

Vishaal Hariprasad - CEO at Resilience

Vishaal helped us out as an expert in cybersecurity, and government—something we’re looking closely at right now. (Probably those are two of the most hated words in trad VC). He’s been very a founder for 10+ years, and prior to that was a supreme being of cybernetic warfare in the service of the US Airforce, presumably preventing the Chinese from installing little kill-switches into powerplant inverters and such.

🚀 Companies

Heron Power - Better power electronics

Status: Seed

Source: CAVI

Founders:

Why it’s cool:

Electrifying everything and renewables means a huge shift in grid balancing and massive strains for the infrastructure that goes along it. Transformers, inverters, rectifiers, even the high-voltage cables weren’t meant to stand up to the volatility and frequencies we’re about to put them up to. Two questions: 1. What’s the timeline on this shift and how is demand distributed? 2. What’s the venture business in selling relatively low cost components?

Stealth - part investment firm, part semiconductor co

Status: Seed

Source: Network

Founders: 1

Why it’s cool:

How do we build an Intel today, and why should governments be interested in funding not just the incumbents, but new large scale projects like Stargate and the data center buildouts in the Gulf region? Probably with massive ambition and realisation that it’s not something you finance through VC only. The tides should have turned with the CHIPS act in the US and similar investments in Europe, but critical industry components are still sourced through Taiwan, China and South Korea. Somewhere in the space between specialized chips, on-shore trailing edge fabs and sovereign wealth funds there’s a massive business to be built.

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💡 Ideas & Science

High-Precision Navigation: The future is near

Mostly basic info on how GNSS works, but good reminder of how it’s not perfect, yet. There are some ways of using tricks to get to high-precision, but nothing magical.

The Re-Industrialization paradox

Felix Neubeck of Playfair published a great thesis on re-industrialization and what types of companies will truly succeed in this space. This type of content is much better suited for humans to write and consume. Why read AI slop from someone else’s prompt? Much prefer to read well-founded opinions and future looking conclusions than primers I could interact with myself.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Recommended read for everyone, even those who actually studied physics. Carlo Rovelli explains complex topics in simple ways, without lessening the beauty of the ideas.

🤼 People

Alexander Schubert - Partner at SciFounders

At a techbio dinner in Munich this week I was lucky enough to sit next to Alexander, we discussed West Coast vs. East Coast biotech funds, artificial embryos, and epigenetics. We also talked about the high signaling value of MD PhDs, and SF mindset.

🚀 Companies

Stealth - Sampling biological reality through parallelized experiments

Status: Pre-seed

Source: Network

Founders: Stealth

Why it’s cool:

Precision fermentation is growing by ~46% CAGR, it produces alternative proteins, enzymes, fats and molecules for pharma. However, scaling production and optimizing yield isn’t easily done. This company runs thousands of micro-experiments in parallel on bio-chips, essentially mL bioreactors, to sample from reality.

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Bi-pedal stealth co - Long-range bi-pedal robotics

Status: Pre-seed

Source: EDTH

Founders: Stealth

Why it’s cool:

Ostriches are pretty good runners… Bi-pedal robots are usually not that fast or energy efficient, so people put them on a wheeled platform. This team thinks they’ve figured out a mechanism for making them more scalable and flexible. Applications could be abound.

💡 Ideas & Science

How prediction markets create harmful outcomes: a case study

Prediction markets: the beloved use case of crypto, though it’s questionable how much of crypto is needed to run e.g., Polymarket. This is a pretty good criticism of some of the “harmful outcomes” of prediction markets by a high-performing forecaster. Incentivizing fraud, the production and spreading of misinformation and generally acting more like sports betting sites than futarchies. Co-incidentally, I earned my first bitcoin by participating in a forecasting contest in the early 2010s!

The AI energy bottleneck - Complex Systems podcast

Patrick McKenzie interviews Institute for Progress’ Tim Fist about how AI is fundamentally bottlenecked by energy supply, both in chip production, but also in operation. My favorite idea from this interview was that even if AI progress stagnates here, the massive economic pressure in the AI buildout for achieving cheap energy likely leads to a full green transition. It might be solar+batteries, it might be geothermal, or something else, but it’s being paid for by data centers.

In Pursuit of ‘Space Control,’ USSF Gets First Upgraded Jammer

Space is being weaponized. It’s clearly a strategic priority, with a fairly consistent upwards trend since the 1950s. We’re now seeing the first signs of Russian-designed Starshield (military Starlink)-targeting devices and likely capability of the Chinese to harm Western space assets. Luckily there is Lodestar Space and Radical Aero!

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In the meantime, we’ve been doing some deep research on a couple of topics, which we’re going to be publishing soon on Kepler.

🤼 People

Jamie Croucher - Founder of Society for Technological Advancement

Jamie is now also an Officer for capabilities with NATO DIANA, but prior to that he started the SOTA, which is focused on advancing society through technology and science. Shouldn’t be a hard sell but surprisingly it’s one-of-a-kind org. We talked about high agency people and cultures, and how to further progress and abundance. He’s working on an important hackathon around rebooting state capacity in London on the 26-27th of April.

Danielle Strachman - Founding team member of the Thiel Fellowship, and Founder and GP of 1517 Fund

Danielle is a teacher who started an own charter school, then continued helping young talent through the Thiel Fellowship, now 15 years ago. Then she launched the 1517 Fund. We had a great conversation about [REDACTED] and how to identify truly exceptional people. In a podcast interview she said VCs wouldn’t give the Thiel Fellows the time of day, until they launched the 1517 Fund and showed that it was interesting from a venture perspective.

🚀 Companies

Axonic - Ozempic for sleep

Status: Pre-seed

Source: Network

Founders: Helena Rosengarten and Isaak Freeman

Why it’s cool:

Imagine you don’t have to sleep as much, but still feel replenished. Without negative effects! What a productivity gain for humanity his could be, basically reducing our unnecessary down-time from 7-8h to 4-6h! Helena and Isaak are on to something here, great examples of people who just can’t not do something.

DeepGate - Bit-level intelligence

Status: Unknown

Source: CAVI

Founders: Christian Taylor

Why it’s cool:

Deepgate is building energy-efficient AI systems by embedding intelligence at the logic gate level, aiming to drastically lower energy use and enhance inference speed. Targets significant reduction in energy consumption required for AI systems while also increasing the speed of AI inference.

The Electric Plant Co - Plant intelligence

Status: Seed

Source: CAVI

Founders: Lee M. von Kraus, Justin Mast

Why it’s cool:

Plant intelligence technology company developing bioware systems to capture and interpret electrochemical signals from plants. Creates AI models to decode plant data for environmental monitoring and climate adaptation applications.

New concepts unlocked: Cyborg Botany, Techno-Biophilia and Hildegard of Bingen.

💡 Ideas & Science

Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror

Mimetic contagion, as a concept from Rene Girard, is the worst at University. Young, impressionable minds within a context of zero-sum, top-of-class, scholarship students all choosing approximately the same paths. Of my engineering physics class, a very large amount went to consulting, almost no one founded a company. How can we make young people choose more for themselves?

“I’ll end with a quote from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning: “Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.””

The State of Photonic Computing<2025>

Lawrence of Lunar ventures has published another great overview article on the state of photonic computing. Tl;dr: memory is still in its infancy, but we are already seeing early signs of adoption. It’s also increasingly interesting due to European sovereignty and applications in contested EM environments.

America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

Semianalysis goes deep on robotics and the supply chain of manufacturing. China has continued to invest in automation way beyond any other country. “[…] China pivoted and increased their robotics installation by 44% from 2020-2021 in order to implement automation to make up for the lack of a workforce.”

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🤼 People

Max Samuel - General Partner at Snö

Max moved from managing legal and investments at Thiel Capital in LA to a town in Norway with about 100k inhabitants and is now investing with the generalist, early-stage fund Snö (meaning snow in most Scandinavian languages). Norway saw a massive exodus of founders last year, so it’s mostly Sweden, Denmark and Finland where entrepreneurial endeavors happen.

Cyrus Yari - GP at Rational VC

Cyrus moved to Munich! He left the big city of London to enjoy the deep tech, Weißwurst and outdoors scene in Europe’s sixth largest GDP, Bavaria. He immediately set up a Founders running group, together with Elika, which I joined this week. A good mix of ex-Lilium engineers, AI founders and a few VCs.

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🚀 Companies

Portia - predictable, controllable and authenticated agents

Status: ?

Source: CAVI

Founders: Emma Burrows, Mounir Mouawad

Why it’s cool:

Not very counter-consensus I guess, but very likely to be useful. Agents will lead to an exponential compute explosion. Pre: human triggers program; Post: human triggers agent who triggers programs. We should ideally know how and what they do, on whose behalf.

Clairvoyant - Securing software supply chain

Status: 3rd year

Source: CAVI

Founders: Douglas Schultz, Gautam Altekar

Why it’s cool:

Zero trust is a great model! But cumbersome to implement. Clairvoyant helps you gain visibility into your IoC, faster.

Integral - implanted brain modulation devices for treating disorders

Status: ?

Source: CAVI

Founders: Philip Sabes (Neuralink cofounder), Milan Cvitkovic

Why it’s cool:

If we want to really make compute efficient, then we need to get closer to our own hardware - aka wetware, aka grey matter. If we can’t enhance our own brains it’ll be very hard to increase bandwidth enough to keep up with compute ex vivo. Humans will be outpaced rapidly.

💡 Ideas & Science

Chinese Deep Sea Cable Cutter

If you ever wondered why it looked like certain russian trawlers were going back and forth over the location where a subsea cable carrying vital internet infrastructure hundreds of times, it’s not because the fishing is so good there. It’s because they don’t have the Cable Cutter Pro (CCP), Xi’s newest gadget. More reasons to have redundant infrastructure, surveillance and counter-measures at sea of these assets.

Book review: Abundance

Noah Smith reviews Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book: Abundance. Still in the mail, so haven’t read yet, but based on the review, there might be many explanations for why we’re not getting things that we want, or at least the policy isn’t being made to enable that.

DNA is the new oil

M42 is Abu Dhabi’s biggest healthcare company, and they have one of the largest DNA collections in the world. They’ve sequenced data from over 800k people, 700k of which are Emiratis. Now they’re looking to monetize it.

Space-Based Solar Power And Its Current Bottleneck

We’ve covered a few SBSP companies here in the weekly digest, EMF Space and Reflect Orbital to name two, as well as some research on it (see the first edition ever). Space Ambition published a good overview of the basic concepts you need to understand to accurately judge viability. SBSP is all about economics, grid dynamics, EM, and orbital dynamics. Easy-peasy.

🤼 People

Martin Schilling - CEO at Deep Tech Momentum

Deep Tech Momentum is a deep tech conference and network in Berlin, and Martin founded it after Techstars Berlin. We discussed what the European deep tech ecosystem needs, what current topics of relevance are (surprise they intersect with our interests), and how to collaborate.

🚀 Companies

[REDACTED] - offline p2p money

Status: Idea/PoC

Source: Network

Founders: [REDACTED]

Why it’s cool:

Bitcoin is great, so are stablecoins. It’s clearly superior technology to traditional digital money. However, it’s not truly peer-to-peer. It always goes through a “node” and requires a global state update. What if we could have cryptographically secured, offline, digital cash? It would be private by default, work in all settings and be instantaneous. We could make it programmable without complex smart contracts or other scaffolding. All it requires is some very cool cryptography…

[REDACTED] - Wetlab on semiconductor

Status: pre-seed

Source: Network

Founders: PhDs in microfluidics

Why it’s cool:

We need to speed up the physical part of the learning loop. Especially in the biological and chemical realm. Why there? Because of the massive lag in physical loop vs digital loop. We can simulate and compute all we like, but if we don’t go closer to the actual physical reality and work on accelerating that part of the loop we’re not going to achieve much.

EMF Space - Space-based power to earth

Status: pre-raise

Source: Discord

Founders: Dan CaJacob, Eric Haengel

Why it’s cool:

Normally, the efficiency of reflecting sunlight onto earthly solar farms is iffy. EMF however, want to collect solar in high orbit 24/7, convert it to laser, and beam it in to earth, supplying solar farms with illumination. If this works, it’s very cool. Scale will be hard.

💡 Ideas & Science

Meta’s brain-to-text tech is here

Meta and the Basque Center on Brain, Cognition and Language have been working on decoding brain signals, training an AI model on it and then using it to better predict thoughts/words. It’s interesting, doesn’t seem ready yet, but along side a couple of other interesting initiatives we’re seeing it’s heading towards an inflection point in human-machine interfaces.

Microsoft’s topological qubit that wasn’t, maybe?

You may have read/heard about Majorana, Microsofts 1-qubit chip. It made splashes, Satya Nadella came on the Dwarkesh Podcast and the results looked promising. However, there are reasons to be skeptical. Henry Legg (University of St Andrews) argues that Microsoft’s topological gap protocol for detecting Majorana zero modes is vulnerable to false positives, undermining the foundation of their qubit design. Peer reviewers of Microsoft’s Nature paper also noted it provides no conclusive proof of MZMs, only "findings that might enable future experiments", which you know, surprise! Media overstated research implications and company didn’t correct them!

Microsoft also had to retract a Nature paper on this in 2018 due to data manipulation…

Space Force general: ‘Golden Dome’ missile shield requires Manhattan Project-scale effort

Remember Space Force, it’s not just a Netflix show, they actually exist and do… real things. Presumably. Just kidding, we know the Space domain will continue to be very important for national security. Partially hence our investment in Lodestar. A Golden Dome is not related to Trumps adventures in Moscow in the 80s, but rather an American Iron Dome (of course it’s golden) to protect against any aerial threat to the CONUS. And it will be expensive and difficult, says guy in charge of requesting budget for it and building it, General Michael Guetlein.

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Either way, now that the dust has settled, we can look back at the hackathon with pride. In the last year, we’ve built a tech-driven “do tank” for European defense. It feels more relevant today than ever before. Coming in as outsiders to the defense industry, we’ve been warmly welcomed and received such encouragement that it’s impossible not to continue. Is this what product-market fit feels like?

During my opening speech at the Munich defense tech hackathon we ran in parallel to the Munich Security Conference (no endorsement or affiliation either direction to be clear), I wanted to drive home three reasons “Why” and one ask for “How” hackers and members should participate.

The “Why” is a very clear story made up of long-lasting trends reinforced by headlines I pulled from 24h before the talk:

1/ We are already at war (whether we’ve realized or not) and it’s likely to continue

2/ The numbers are not on our side - Russia outspends and outmans non-Ukraine Europe any day and are replenishing the arsenals

3/ We can not count on the US to save us - in fact, as highlighted this past week, relying on the US is a liability

The “How” is a request and an imperative. Nothing else will work. We can only use our technological superiority and adoption thereof - we can not control much else. And for this innovation to matter, it must be built at a monumental scale. In fact I refer to a local Monument in Munich - Bavaria, lady of the state. She watches of the place of the Oktoberfest, wearing a bear skin from a bear she killed, she’s carrying a sword, next to her is a pet lion and she’s triumphantly waving a wreath. Pretty bad ass. It was built to remind the people of Bavaria of the bravery and achievements. To unite them against a potential enemy.

Our modern monuments will need to look differently. Symbolism and memes will matter, but achievements of what it represents will matter more. Hence, we need to create the achievements to be proud of, and create that memetic matter, the genetic code from which pride is built. This can only arise from insanely ambitious endeavors.

That was my plead to the 400 participants in Munich, and to you.

If you decide to take this up, and build a monumental idea with tech. Let me know and I will do everything in my power to make it come true.

As guests to the event we had the CTO of Helsing - Robert Fink, who’s been supporting the mission in action since the beginning, members of the Ukrainian parliament, representation from 3rd Assault Brigade of the AFU, veterans from other European militaries, Florian Seibel, founder of Quantum Systems, and literally hundreds of other extremely talented people. We have more work to do, much more, but I am extremely proud of what we’ve achieved. Thanks to Benjamin Wolba and the EDTH team, as well as our partners who make it possible.

Sifted wrote about the event here, and Anne quoted me here on something i said during the event.

🤼 People

Ifa Reist - Venture Partner at Protego Ventures

Ifa has been running business and investing into them for the last decade and currently acts as venture partner with Protego Ventures, a new VC in Israel investing mainly in defense tech. She and I spoke about the recent Munich Security Conference, as well as developments in Israel within the tech and VC community.

🚀 Companies

Check out the winners of the hackathon and their brief explanations here → they’re all cool for obvious reasons. But there were also 39 other teams who were cool for other reasons. We’ll try and support the ones who wish to continue post-hackathon and get them in contact with talent, customers, users.

💡 Ideas & Science

2034

A terrifying, easy to read, entertaining story of the next world war. It’s written by former Admiral of the US Navy, James G. Stavridis and Elliott Ackerman so has the appropriate level of military jargon if you’re into that. Thanks Claudio Flores for the recommendation! I’ve started 2054, the sequel already!

Why TRL is a flawed concept

Nathan Mintz runs a great blog, go read his piece on hiring veterans. Here’s a quote from this piece on Technology Readiness Levels and why the concept doesn’t work that well in implementation.

“There are several reasons why the TRL scale no longer make sense. Building hardware today, thanks to technical innovations like reprogrammable ICs (FPGAs, GPUs), 3D printers, rapid simulation tools and CAD/CAM techniques, has never been easier. It’s about as hard to build hardware today as it was to write software when I started my career 20 years ago. Software is even easier: nowadays there are so many libraries, open source tools and APIs, not to mention AI copilots that are just starting to see widespread adoption, that your average software engineer is 10x more productive than they were then”

The Gigabit Wall: No More Need for Speed

Spicy take: we don’t need faster than 1Gbps mobile internet!

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Other fun facts about the audience:

• There was no one from the Swedish government/MoD there (or at least no one officially)

• 2 people had heard of Leopold Aschenbrenner (both US citizens)

• 1 person thought the most important thing we could be working on for national security was AGI (<3 to you)

• A majority of panelists and speakers were of US-origin

🤼 People

Shaffir Alikhan - Chief, Commercial Engagement and Outreach, U.S. European Command at US DoD

Shaffir is working at EUCOM in Stuttgart and working on bridging the gap between European innovation, learnings and the US DoD. He’s setting up a new team and a couple of exciting events to bring together these worlds. There’s a lot missing in connecting the private sector with procurement processes and even just requirements for capabilities, both in the US and Europe.

🚀 Companies

CarbonOS - Manufacturing operating system

Status: <1y old

Source: CAVI

Founders: Thomas Smith, Rob Carrington, Brad Barbin

Why it’s cool:

Manufacturing is stuck in 1990, mostly, with small shops running on experience and industry tradecraft rather than software. Hadrian, Isembard and a few others are trying to change that alongside CarbonOS.

[Redacted] Bio - Genomic sample prep

Status: Pre-seed

Source: Network

Founders: [Redacted]

Why it’s cool:

Genomic data is the fastest growing data set in the world. Cost of processing is coming down, but to get to the $100 genome we need to reduce the cost of sample prep, and also make sampling economical, i.e., not waste the sample in preparation.

Oris - Power beaming in space

Status: Pre-seed

Source: CAVI

Founders:

Why it’s cool:

In space, power beaming is much more efficient than in atmosphere due to lower system loss. We’ll need constant power for bunch of satellites, the question is if beaming if from other places makes sense. Like Reflect orbital but in space?

💡 Ideas & Science

Eyes in the Skies

China now does about 2 orbital launches a month. And space requires ground stations, preferably across the entire globe to have coverage. This article is giving a pretty damning view of Chinese usage of ground stations in South America and, surprisingly, Sweden.

Europol chief says Big Tech has “responsibility” to unlock encrypted messages

Digital privacy is important to us at Inflection, and among the many misguided attempts at keeping up with criminals learning how to use basic consumer products, applying more pressure to build in backdoors is likely to backfire than most other things.

Researcher tests “Deep Research” to discover it’s not perfect

Deep research isn’t really made for actual research. That being said, I think we could all learn to become better prompters and be more patient with our AI companions (note to future AGI overlord and current humans).

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🤼 People

Jeanine Graat - EMEA manager at Ultimaker

My new slogan is “Don’t BCC the CCP” and part of that is not supporting/working with chinese component manufacturers, or in this case 3D printing companies. Ultimaker supplies printers to the Dutch Navy and are expanding into defense/dual use applications, where data is highly critical.

TL;DR

don’t print sensitive stuff on your Bambuu printer (it will send your data to Xi).

Exactly 0 ppl said they’d be sad if I stopped pushing portfolio jobs here so I’ll stop doing it. Visit our jobs board yourselves instead

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🚀 Companies

Aiurion - self-optimizing laser powder bed fusion pipelines

Status: Raising seed

Source: CAVI

Founders: in assemblage apparently

Why it’s cool:

3D printing for more than prototyping is real, (see EOS and Solideon) but pretty niche still. Maybe Aiurion (please change names though) can change that?

[redacted] - OSS supply chain security

Status: pre-funding

Source: network

Founders: ex-gov cyber sec. + ex-CISO

Why it’s cool:

We see an inflection point in software vulnerabilities and attacks within the open source software stack, and at the same time massive reliance (and AI training) on OSS. There should be an incentive to build a business in here.

Fractal Brain - new foundation models

Status: Probably raised 100M pre-seed /s

Source: CAVI

Founders: Filip Filipinski

Why it’s cool:

All in on RL since DeepSeek dropped of course, and now I see more people are working on this area! What are the odds. JK, RL was always cool.

💡 Ideas & Science

BOOM

After the American airline companies blocked a decidedly European supersonic company from flying cross country in the US 40+ years ago, probably through some dealings with the FAA, there’s finally a homegrown, US-domiciled supersonic commercial company! Boom Supersonic flew the XB-1 “Baby boom” above Mach 1 last week. It’s progress and a shot at getting across the world without massive pains! Read more at Ashlee Vance’s substack.

The Short Case for Nvidia Stock

Reportedly Meta set up an emergency response unit to DeepSeek’s revelation. NVIDIA tanked and people panicked, meanwhile Satya teaches the world about Jevon’s paradox. If you want an in-depth analysis check out SemiAnalysis thoughts on the topic. Tl;dr: it cost more than $6M to pre-train. Personally, I think DeepSeek was priced in (because why the hell not, it wasn’t a secret) and there conflation between early knowledge of massive tariffs about to come and an open-source GPT-4o equivalent model.

Meta’s hyperscaler infrastructure

How to build a massive data-center, as told by Meta. No one objects to vertical integration. The article is a bit much corporate-speak for my taste, but reminds us of the staggering scale at which these (US) companies operate. Up to a million servers per region…

New Space

A hype movie about all the cool aerospace companies in the US and the force of all the talent flowing in and out of SpaceX, by Jason Carman (formerly S3, now Story and Science). New Space as a category was created by SpaceX, not NASA, not Boeing, and certainly not by ESA/Ariane. Starlink is growing like crazy, and Europe struggles to do 10 launches a year. China ramps up capacity, while practicing how to take down satellites with rockets.

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The week after that, we’re hosting 300+ people for the European Defense Tech Hackathon at the Munich Security Conference (non-affiliated, just coinciding but good for you if you’re going). It’s a 4-day event for hackers, defense investors, companies, veterans and startups. We’re starting with workshops on everything from computer vision, data for defense, drone TTPs and additive manufacturing. Then there is 2 full days of hacking on challenges defined by top startups/scaleups in the space and the Ukrainian MoD.

On Sunday Feb 16th we’re hosting a massive demo day at the an awesome location in central Munich, open to externals. Sign up on Luma as a visitor!

🤼 People

Tor-Oskar Karlberg - Investor at Stephen industries

Stephen industries is a family-owned investment firm out of Helsinki, Finland. Tor-Oskar and I chatted about the impact investing can have, on local and global scale. We agree that as smaller funds, we need to spend time on things that others can’t or won’t. We also explored in-depth a potential co-invest. More coming.

Want to be on here next week?

💼 Portfolio jobs board

• If you’re sad that I’m not listing any jobs here this week, send me a message:

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🚀 Companies

Nine Diagnostics - Very fast diagnostics for cancer

Status: Pre-Seed

Source: CAVI

Founders: Daniel Heller, Freddy Nguyen

Why it’s cool:

Closing the “Live-Chain”, aka speeding up the feedback loops between identifying what is wrong and giving treatment is an important endeavor. Nine Diagnostics have some proprietary carbon nanotube sensing tech which allows them to create multidimensional profiles which can inform the treatment decision faster than existing analysis tools.

Ironsite - The future of workers

Status: Incubation

Source: Southpark Commons

Founders: Max Mona, Randy Perillo, Andrew Jebasingh

Why it’s cool:

Construction is fairly un-digitalized for various reasons (speculation: material to labor cost ratio, little competition, lack of new talent inflow, capital/political environment non-conducive to construction booms). Ironsite is putting GoPro’s on hardhats like it’s an extreme sport, and extracts insights in real-time on construction processes from the data.

Podium Automation - Custom control panels

Status: Pre-seed

Source: CAVI

Founders: Jacob Buser, Jamie Niu

Why it’s cool:

Can you imagine something less sexy than those grey cabinets every building has with wiring inside? It controls the power and connectivity of the space they’re in, be it industrial robots, HVAC systems, residential apartment buildings or a green house. If you know what UL 508A is, this is for you.

💡 Ideas & Science

So you want to build your own data center via Future of Computing newsletter

Data centers seem like a promising beta play. If you want to know how to build one, taught by someone who already did so, this is a nice post! There are too many posts on data center economics and physics (cooling is hard and cool) to mention here, but it’s worth getting deep into. Fun fact: racks are getting so heavy because of compute concentration that floors need to be re-thought.

Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race

Chinatalk did a great interview with the Deepseek CEO and founder of one of the top quant hedge funds in the world, High-Flyer (幻方). They are outsiders, non-finance people, starting from first-principles only and tackling one hard problem after the other. They hire almost exclusively based on capability instead of experience. Hypothesis: high capability and capacity to learn transfers better than any experience. Even specific experience turns stale quickly in an unconventional org.

Taiwan's Future, Nuclear Proliferation, and Trump 2.0 with Lily Ottinger of ChinaTalk

Another ChinaTalk episode, this time a cross-over with Econ 102, Noah Smith and Eric Torenberg’s podcast. Why Xi Jinping is the ultimate Boomer (”Software isn’t real technology”) and why Japan and South Korea should get nuclear weapons immediately. It’s a great listen honestly. Many spicy takes.

Designing for the end

This is not about “the end-THE END” but just about the end of satellites. Space debris is a problem as we know, it clutters the valuable orbits, and grows exponentially (breaking satellites travelling at 28,000 km/h into tiny pieces will break other satellites which hits others and so on). The worst is that once we have this band of bullets around the earth we can’t use space very well anymore. So we’d need to go to the stratosphere, or clean it up. This blog makes an argument that it’s not so bad, since stuff naturally falls out of the sky, even at altitudes beyond what we thought.

🤼 People

Mengyao Han - Founder at t2

Mengyao is one of the most resilient people I know. She is not unreasonably optimistic, aware of limitations and difficulties, yet almost nothing can stop her from doing her best. This is a trait we look for in our founders, but is very hard to gauge from even an extensive due diligence process. There are signs, and life stories which, if shared give us reason to believe this person has been through hardship and stood up again. We talked about learnings, about treating ourselves with kindness and what progress looks like.

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• Sr. Digital Design Verification Engineer at Fabric

• Distributed Systems Engineer at Flashbots

• Senior Frontend Engineer at Ora

• More

🚀 Companies

Dystr - Automating engineering workloads

Status: Seed

Source: Network

Founders: Nabeel and Julie

Why it’s cool:

Making non-coding engineers 10x more efficient at their jobs because they can just use a simple low-code tool for every day tasks. Like Matlab if you didn’t have to write matlab!

Yotta Labs - Decentralized compute for AI workloads

Status: Pre-seed

Source: CAVI

Founders: X

Why it’s cool:

Not all AI has to happen centrally, or on your own device in real-time. A remote network of compute could run an agent “unstoppably” to live its life online. How this makes economic sense is a question with an answer you probably don’t want to hear: 🤫 tokens

Roc Camera - Capture verifiably real moments

Status: Pre-order

Source: CAVI

Founders: Kosuke

Why it’s cool:

A physical application of nice cryptography just makes you happy. Dan Boneh has floated the idea of a proof of a collected physical artifact (e.g., photons incident on a CMOS), but we haven’t seen anyone implement it at scale yet.

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💡 Ideas & Science

Tolkien on Machines

“There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour.”

Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam

One can theoretcially use a beam of neutrinos, subatomic particles that almost don’t interact with anything, to all “focus” on a distant point. For example, it can traverse the earth and if enough neutrinos interact with parts of a nuclear bomb, it would destroy it. Sadly, this will require 50GW to operate, order of magnitude stronger magnets than we have today and a 1000km accelerator. If anyone has a muon collider lying around of more than 100 TeV let me know.

The rise and fall of “fact-checking”

Fact-checkers and fake news have peaked as a separate concept from just good journalism and gullability, as Zuck announced they’re removing fact-checking from Meta’s platforms. Misinformation certainly exists as a too to control and manipulate groups online, but it’s very unclear if a group of human fact-checkers help or abet those spreading misinformation, or are helping one group more than another.

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🤼 People

Daniel Schulte-Hillen - Investor at SDAC

Daniel ran product at N26 and Taxfix, before starting investing (and co-investing with Inflection). We talked about defense and other common interests (to be announced ;) )

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• Senior Web3 Engineer at Molecule

• Senior Frontend Engineer at Ora

• Senior Backend Engineer at Ora

• More

🚀 Companies

Mater-AI - AI to find thermoelectric materials

Status: Pre-Seed

Source: Accelerator

Founders: Nicolaas, Chelsea and Gatleen

Why it’s cool:

Thermoelectric materials are like piezoelectric materials in the sense that one form of energy comes in and electricity comes out. In thermoelectric ones it’s (you guessed it) heat that comes in! It’s usually very small voltages generated (microV per K difference) and the highest efficiency materials are prohibitively expensive at the moment. Hence, why we need to discover new ones!

Aedil - Solving problems underwater

Status: NATO DIANA cohort

Source: NATO DIANA

Founders: Øyvind and Ørjan

Why it’s cool:

Founders worked with submarines for 15 years before. There’s not much more to say, beyond them having two public products: an acoustic visualization tool and a data/knowledge management tool.

Oris Space - Powerbeaming in space

Status: Seed

Source: CAVI

Founders:

Why it’s cool:

Power transmission in space is absolutely cooler than transmission from space to earth! And there will be energy needs in orbit, even when there’s no sun. The question is how good (Wh/kg/$) batteries will get…

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💡 Ideas & Science

The underlying factors behind the wildfire

The wildfires in LA are set to become the costliest in human history. Someone put together an amazing overview of the reasons that all build up to why there are these catastrophic fires in LA. It’s down to meteorological conditions and fuel. The meteorology is high temperatures before the fire, drying out the fuel, high winds during the fire, spreading the fire. Tl;dr, it’s not climate change btw. The fuel situation is bad because there’s a lot of it and it’s dry. They didn’t do the controlled burns in time, even though they knew it was a big risk…

Contraption theory

Venkatesh Rao writes about contraption factor - a way to measure system complexity in relation to design integrity. They’re technologies like helicopters, nothing designed or inspired by nature, very complex. Fun fact: European-designed helicopters have rotors going clockwise and American ones counter-clockwise, typically. The design integrity refers to how well designed, how tight or how aestethic the design is of the object. Helicopters feel magical in a different way than what Arthus C. Clarke meant by “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

The unbearable slowness of being via Alex F

Why are we only processing at roughly 10 bits/s when our senses are taking in information at 100,000,000x that?

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💡 Ideas & Science

A Meme Stock for Private Companies

Meme stocks and coins, Nice and Fun Markets, Avi Eisenberg trial, this is a fun piece from April last year by Matt Levine.

I’m rich and have no idea what to do with my life

Loom was acquired by Atlassian for nearly $1B. Founder Vinay realized that Big Corp work wasn’t really fulfilling. In this reflection piece he is very honest about something very human - the feeling of “is this it?” once we’ve reached a goal. Of course in his case, it’s building a company and making more money than he could ever spend. Why do we feel we need to achieve something “impactful”? Why does one not only want, but need for fulfillment, to work on the biggest, most significant problem?

A Novel Sensor Network Capable of Observing the Hypothetical Mach Field

We don’t have a clear explanation for where inertia is coming from. There’s a theory which seems hard to fully incorporate in general relativity, called Mach’s Principle. The scientific community isn’t convinced, but all the more reason to try and explore these fundamental problems by questioning existing theories. As per Popper, there’s a small community of researchers trying to falsify Mach’s principle. It’s a fascinating rabbit hole.

Irregular Warfare in 2024: Lessons Learned, Paths Forward

There are many gems in here, from how Russian and Ukrainian propaganda/PR/PsyOps have evolved, to tracking of cyber operations, to Gray Zone warfare in China, to measuring resilience; there’s enough reading to be done here for sure. The character of war and geopolitics in 2025 is one of “nuance, interconnectivity and relentless change”. Boundaries are shifting, action and the meaning of action changes, and power is taken and lost in new ways.

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Roots of Progress: 2024 in review

I’m realizing this is becoming a listicle, but this is again such a treasure trove (gems inside). The Roots of Progress blog is run as a non-profit around the philosophy of progress and the techno-societal acceleration we need to work towards. It’s a mix of economics, philosophy, technology deep-dives and politics.

A list of Predictions made in 1925 about 2025

Mildly amusing.

Restarting Germany’s Reactors: Feasibility and Schedule

Bad, though not so surprising, news for Germany: electricity imports have skyrocketed in 2023/2024, going up to 25TWh net, while emissions from electricity production are 18 times higher than neighboring France, per capita. The good news: reversing nuclear shutdowns are a surprisingly popular opinion, it’s economical and feasible. Is it something politicians have understood or are willing to represent though?

Next week we’ll be back with regular programming!

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This is somewhat belated, but we have very good reasons for it. We’ve decided to forego any holiday calm and instead accelerate into the new year by doing some amazing f*cking investments we couldn’t be more excited about.

After the first year of SVRGN Weekly Digests (the first one was Jan 26 2024), my conclusion is that I enjoy writing these short form reflections, and some of you apparently enjoy reading them. It can be a pain to do, hence why they are sometimes published Sunday at midnight, but honestly I always look forward to looking at all the cool people, companies and ideas we explored this week.

If you’d like us to continue publishing, please share it with your cave-man friends who need some culture and refinement in their lives, this may positively reinforce our behavioral loops of external gratification as we see the subscriber numbers go up.

During the holidays we’re hoping you receive something very special: time to read. There’s so much interesting reading to do, and too little time, so choose carefully. What can be better than putting on your noise-canceling headphones, to tune out family, dogs, Kalle Anka (if you’re in Sweden), and getting deep into some details about NVIDIAs Blackwell architecture, Popper’s 3 worlds, or microbial TNT detectors?

All I want for Christmas is enlightenment.

🤼 People

Christian Reber - Founder at Interface capital

Christian founded and exited Wunderlist, Superlist, Pitch.com and now Interface capital. With Interface, he’s doing some very interesting early stage investments. We also share bullishness on Europe, and bearishness on Berlin.

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• Senior DevOps Engineer at Flashbots

• Compiler Engineer, Parallel Computing Platforms at Fabric

• Processor Design Engineer at Ubitium

• More

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🚀 Companies

Defense Media company - Covering New Defense in Europe

Status: Operating

Source: EDTH

Founders: Experienced journalist and ex-military

Why it’s cool:

We need knowledgable coverage of defense tech news in Europe. Not necessarily a traditional VC case, but certainly important and a white space that should be filled. If you’re interested in learning more, dm me!

💡 Ideas & Science

Lemon market

Seminal econ paper from the 1970’s. It’s one of those ideas/results that are very intuitive when you heard it. First heard by befriended VC Elad of Lunar when discussing a market structures in venture.

Popper’s three worlds

We are forever chasing ideas and mental models that help us widen our thinking. Popper describes a metaphysical framework for an evolutionary emergence of worlds. World 1 is the physical world. World 2 is the consciousness, experience and thoughts of (presumably mostly) humans. World 3 contains knowledge and ideas such as scientific theory, art and thought objects.

Neural Operators

Neural operators are a key concept in how AI can model reality. It’s a deep learning architecture for learning mappings between infinite function spaces. They seem particularly well-suited to simulating and solving partial differential equations. One trained model can be discretized differently, allowing for flexible resolutions.

Is AI progress slowing down?

In short, probably there are headwinds to scaling by “just” applying more compute. Big surprise. To state that model scaling is over is likely another in the long line of “erroneous predictions about AI”. Inference scaling (à la o1 and DeepSeek R1) might provide some respite from lack of quality data, but probably won’t solve every problem. Finally, current capabilities are most likely far from fully exploited, which mostly comes down to the application layer.

DeepSeek v3

A very well-performing open-source model is published by a Chinese AI company. What’s especially interesting is the cumulative training cost is something like $6M for a 600B+ param model. Compare this to GPT-4 which cost >$100M to train. It’s an explicit mixture-of-experts model, with a few interesting architecture tricks like training in FP8 and switching to BF16 for a few optimization runs. They also drop the banger “NVIDIA should make better chips” (I’m paraphrasing) in the section about fine-grained quantization.

Autonomous microbial sensors enables long-term detection of TNT explosive in natural soil

Genetic circuits in microbes that work in a natural environment. They tune and characterize the sensitivity of the microbe towards TNT explosive. But this could be used for general bio-safety by identifying dangerous pathogens, improving fertilizer usage or generally providing geospatial data streams at scale.

The Investing Meta-Game

Alpha is defined by the “water you swim in” and your peers. It’s no longer a competitive advantage to have access to Bloomberg, a trove of quant PhDs. All investment strategies are information front-running. When Buffet set up his amazing fund structure where he committed to paying his LPs the difference between the annual return goal and actual return, he was largely competing against mom-and-pop investors. Today, markets are mostly sophisticated and e.g., Credit Suisse published explicit strategies for scalping retail (can’t locate the reference at the moment, but it was a gleeful paper).

[Europe under attack] EstLink cable disruption

I love the Finnish way of dealing with Russian state-backed terrorists. Just board the ship that obviously just dragged their anchor throw critical infrastructure and arrest the bastards. At the media interview, respond only mono-syllabically. Mostly “No”. Legends…

Improvements since the 1990’s

For some optimism, Gwern writes about some significant and some less significant improvements to life through technology and science since the 1990s. To further think about how good we have it, I recommend the opening chapters of “How I learned to understand the world” by physician/statistician/public educator Hans Rosling where the national economic benefit and health improvements of having washing machines is highlighted.

AGI means $100B in profit

OpenAI is free from its allegiance with Microsoft once AGI is reached, which is defined by having $100B in profit. Makes sense that there’s a hard number attached to it. Both parties probably know that’s not necessarily it, but are happy with the incentives.

Arctic Riches

A very brief overview of one of the most exciting geographical developments of the next 15 years (until we get to Mars). The Arctic is thawing and suddenly unlocking new “riches” in the form of mineral and gas exploration, and trade routes being accessible. If climate change is gonna happen, can we at least try to profit from it?

Santa Huang has come

The excellent Semianalysis has published a number of in-depth analyses of the Blackwell architecture, and now they also went into the supply chain. I highly recommend the training benchmark they posted earlier. Looking forward to NVIDIA and others pushing Moore’s law further in 2025.

End of 2024

In 2025, I’m looking forward to more great reading, exciting investments, a potentially huge governance dynamics with DOGE, various European elections, Russia/Ukraine/Georgia. I also think we will see further acceptance of defense tech investments in Europe, with several new funds and FoFs set up. We’ll see first major practical results from “AI for Science”, further consolidation in AI startups, and large state initiatives for training and applying AI to defense/national security. Stablecoin fintechs will continue to be closer to traditional fintech, with crypto as a category growing more infrastructure focused.

I’m not going to make any more predictions, but I’m certainly very excited about upcoming major milestones in our portfolio (e.g., Radical Aero, Fabric, Lodestar Space, Anytype, Iron to name a few).

If you made it this far, thank you! This first year of SVRGN Weekly Digests has been a great experience. If you have suggestions for improvement, want to submit content, chat about what we put out, please reach out!

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🤼 People

Larysa Visengeriyeva, Eveline Beer, Satyam Goel - Co-organizers at European Defense Tech Hub

Larysa, Eveline and Satyam all were in Munich this week to enjoy the Future of Computing conference organized by the Benjamin Wolba, my constant companion, but also to talk European Defense Tech Hub. We hatched a few plans, played some Ukrainian music and realized how soon the Munich Security Conference is! To be continued!

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• Systems Performance Engineer at Fabric

• Principal Compiler Engineer, Parallel Computing Platforms at Fabric

• Compiler Engineer, Parallel Computing Platforms at Fabric

• More

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🚀 Companies

Outbound Aero - Re-inventing aviation

Status: $1.1M seed

Source: Network

Founders: Jake, Ian

Why it’s cool:

Boeing and Airbus can’t be allowed to monopolize consumer aviation. As we all know, monopolies lead to complacency, which leads to worse customer experiences. Which describes most flights I’ve ever taken. We need people to build these types of companies, the ones challenging monopolies (like perplexity did for search).

[REDACTED] - Distributed compute resource that is all around us

Status: Raising pre-seed

Source: Network

Founders: from the [REDACTED] industry and AI

Why it’s cool:

We have an untapped resource of compute. It’s something most people own, and it’s most likely the most computationally heavy object we’ll ever purchase. We know distributed training and inference works, so why not help lower the cost of our [REDACTED] by selling the compute it carries?

Dronetector - mmWave radar to detect drones

Status: In accelerator

Source: EDTH

Founders: Matthew, Christopher

Why it’s cool:

Detecting drones is kind of hard, fast moving, small objects, close to the ground. Counter-drone is maybe, probably the sooner market to flourish than the drone market, as soon as the threat exists (which it does), then the need to protect against it exists everywhere. Radar could be an idea, it works in all conditions, is precise if done correctly and Dronetector at least can differentiate between a bird and a quad.

💡 Ideas & Science

We need to talk about Salt Typhoon

Apparently major US Telco providers suffered the worst cyberattack ever and “wide swaths of the population’s privacy was compromised”. Why didn’t we hear about it? Some time ago Netzpolitik, Wired and Bayrischer Rundfunk dropped the news that the intersection of personnel who regularly visit not super secret NSA facilities near Wiesbaden, Germany can also be tracked to various brothels and restaurants. Tracked using data purchased on fairly unregulated markets through brokers. Maybe GDPR is good? But the news of Salt Typhoon (sounds like a great indie band) hadn’t reached me before this article in Politico dropped.

New Jersey Drone Drama

This is my personal version of trash TV. I’ve been following the speculations, alleged sightings, cut together TikTok clips of various things in the sky and of shocked reactions and misinterpretations by the public, and loving it. Is it a bunch of UAPs? Is it the Mexican drug cartel’s latest smuggling scheme? Is it a secret CIA program? My personal favorite: it’s a big guerilla marketing scheme by a counter-drone company to show how easy it is to disturb a whole country.

Space Nukes are Bad

Well written piece by NYT why space nukes are catastrophic. We need to protect against them, so build more arms Lodestar Space please!

The Splendid and the Vile

I’m about half way into this part biography of Churchill, part tales of London under attack during WWII. For a history ignorant person like myself it gives a great view on Churchills personality (he was very relieved when elected PM since then he would be in control, and convinced he knew better than literally anyone else in the UK how to hold Hitler at bay) but also some insights into the people around him. Well-written and only covering the years of the war, unlike the 8-tome seminal full autobiography of Churchill by his son, Randolph and Martin Gilbert.

🤼 People

Adrian Cipriani - artist/engineer at Cipriani Studio

I met Adrian through the brilliant research community series hosted by Alexandria and Raphael Volpert. This week was about simulating physics, but he’s run events around in-space manufacturing and robotic transformers before. The crowd was young, hungry students and builders who want to spend an evening talking about how neural operators work, how V-Sim parallelizes very difficult to parallelize algorithms, and more. Adrian, as an artist and engineer is running a “Renaissance Weekend” in January 2025 in the alps for select interesting people of either or both professions (artist/engineers). There are one or two spots open still, apply here.

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• Senior Web3 Backend Engineer at Molecule

• Full-stack Engineer at Hologram

• BD Representative at Senken

• More

🚀 Companies (hackathon projects from Paris)

Team 1 - neuromorphic cameras for Shahed interception

Status: there’s a company

Source: EDTH

Founders: [redacted] but go sleuth around

Why it’s cool:

The winning team used event cameras - aka. neuromorphic cameras to track moving objects in the sky and track them using CV. Event cameras work not like normal digital camera sensors, but rather based on the difference in incoming photons. This makes any movement easily detectable, even in very bad lighting conditions. One defense use case is to track incoming drones, e.g., Shaheds (still plaguing Ukraine, though some were spoofed to turn around and go into Belarus).

Team 16 - Magnetic navigation for underwater applications

Status: loose band of geniuses

Source: EDTH

Founders: loose band of geniuses

Why it’s cool:

Water is very annoying, it gets in everywhere and doesn’t let through most of the useful frequencies of the EM spectrum. That makes GNSS and communications very hard. This team mapped the hackathon venue using the magnetometer on their phone and then built a geo-location algorithm based on it. They also figured out a way to scale that to the Black Sea.

Team 23 - Adversarial ML to counter autonomy

Status: loose band of geniuses

Source: EDTH

Founders: loose band of geniuses, at least one founder

Why it’s cool:

Everything is jammed, so drones need autonomy. Surveillance towers need autonomy to sift through all the data, and it’s likely something along the lines of Yolo running in the background. Even if it’s not, there are techniques for tricking the algo’s - aka Adversarial Machine Learning. This team managed to use a Carlini Wagner adversarial attack pattern to make a drone-detection algo think it’s a bird.

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💡 Ideas & Science

Control the metal, control the world

An older read, but more relevant than ever. Some metals in even smaller amounts can have critical implications on the productive capacity of industrial nations. As an example, China chose to ramp up production of less technologically advanced batteries (LFPs are safer but lower capacity), and thereby cut cost from under the feet of any Western producers, while maintaining control over the Manganese used in NMP batteries. As another confirmation of the de-globalization and trade wars, China chose to ban exports of critical minerals to the US this week.

Manufacturing is a war

Noah Smith strikes again. This is not a surprise to anyone, but the framing is extremely good. Sad numbers mostly on how we (democracies) have lost against state-induced mass manufacturing in China. Germany did great for some time in selling high-end machinery to China, until they stole most of the know-how and designs to now be able to outproduce Germany by orders of magnitude.

Late takes on OpenAI o1

There’s a great paper by Andy Jones on Scaling scaling laws in board games, which shows a super neat graph on trade-offs between test-time compute and train-time compute to achieve a certain ELO rating. ELO is kind of like the TrueSkill rating system but for two-player setting. TrueSkill is like the Glicko rating system, which is kind of like the Glicko-2 rating system… Sorry. ELO is a number that tells you how good someone is at a game. And the relationship between test-time compute and train-time is log-linear! I.e., you can either spend 10x train-time compute to achieve a certain ELO rating, or spend 15x test-time compute! Hence, o1 by OpenAI is basically a logical arbitrage of that. Instead of inventing new architectures or investing more training compute, it makes sense to just apply more inference compute.

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A full write-up is in the making and will cover some of the projects built during this weekend and the last one in Copenhagen. In the meantime, sign up for the next one in Munich coinciding with the Munich Security Conference.

🤼 People

Kristjan Pihus - CTO at DefSecIntel

When Kristjan joined DefSecIntel as a CTO, they were 4 people in 2022. Now they’re 80. If you don’t know DefSecIntel, it’s maybe because you’re a VC and DefSecIntel has been a cashflow financed/bootstrapped company doing quite well selling border surveillance products in the Baltics and other regions preparing for invasion. Kristjan presented some of the learnings he’s made in developing products for harsh conditions, e.g., GNSS-denied, low-comms environments.

With him as a mentor he had Madis Koplimäe - former special forces in the Estonian army, now heading up special projects for DefSecIntel.

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• Embedded SW engineer at Lodestar

• Staff SW engineer at Flashbots

• More

🚀 Companies (more hackathon projects coming next week!)

Beholder - AI for minerals exploration

Status: Grant

Source: EDTH

Founders: Serhii Lubkin, Daniil Lubkin

Why it’s cool:

Most mining companies don’t do exploration anymore, mostly exploitation. Less than 1% of exploration projects progress to a commercial mine, and it usually takes 20-30 years. Beholder thinks they can improve on that significantly, which could move the success rate to 75%.

Farsight Vision - turning geospatial data into 3D models

Status: Pre-seed

Source: EDTH

Founders: Viktoriia Yaremchuk, Volodymyr Nepiuk

Why it’s cool:

We’re accumulating geospatial footage data faster than ever before, with Ukraine producing over 1.3 million drones this year and more earth-observation satellites being in orbit than ever. To make sense of that data, we need intelligence to turn 2D into 3D, points into graphical objects, and objects into semantic objects.

Glid - Autonomous road to rail

Status: Founded in 2022

Source: Discord

Founders: Kevin Damoa, Craig Woolridge, Matt Mueller

Why it’s cool:

Moving big physical things takes people, time and energy. Which is costly ICYMI. Shipping improved by orders of magnitude in terms of efficiency in the 1960’s because of the widespread adoption of the container standard. Glid (which means glide in Swedish perhaps accidentally), wants to help move containers from trucks to rail and back autonomously. They’ll do it on private property, meaning it can be done without having to respect traffic regulations.

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💡 Ideas & Science

US agency approves T-Mobile, SpaceX license to extend coverage to dead zones

SpaceX/Starlink is now allowed to deliver direct-to-cell services in the US, as of a recent license approval from the Federal Communications Commission. However, they did not get a response on their request to defer the out-of-band-emissions requirement set by the FCC, so they’ll need to lower the transmission power to something that will cap them at text services most likely. For now.

NASA aircraft uncovers site of secret Cold War nuclear missile tunnels under Greenland ice sheet

Turns out the US was interested in Greenland long before Trump and Dryden Brown looked hungrily their way! Cool to see this was “rediscovered” after decades.

The case for AI for Science at Deepmind

Great read recommended by Matt Clifford of EF. From drug or materials discovery to literature reviews and coding. AI can help in many many branches of science. When it comes to helping scientist understand which parts of rapidly growing fields they need to extract what information from to solve their question, AI is the perfect helper. Deepmind lays out 5 areas of opportunity: Knowledge, data, experiments, models and solutions. Then lays out what “ingredients” are needed for successful implementation of these AIs, from problem selection to adoption. They also talk about policy and risks.

🤼 People

Jonas Lejon - critically acclaimed expert in cybersecurity

Jonas is one of Sweden’s most well-known cybersecurity experts, with a history of building companies and consulting others on how to avoid cyber-incidents. We chatted about crypto, GTM in cybersecurity (it’s harder than elsewhere), and how AI will change cybersecurity.

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• Full-stack engineer at Hologram

• BD at Senken

• Senior Machine Vision Engineer at Lodestar

• More

🚀 Companies

[REDACTED] - Underwater drone systems

Status: pre-seed

Source: EDTH

Founders: Physicist, Mech. Eng., CS, EE

Why it’s cool:

Subsea cables are cut left and right, Russian submarines loiter (maybe) everywhere, the Arctic is opening up as a new trade or naval route, and our general understanding of the oceans will need to improve if we want to continue living next to them. [REDACTED] is building support systems for autonomous underwater vehicles, aka drones, such as charging stations and ways to get navigational information without surfacing.

[Redacted] - General autonomy SW for manipulation

Status: Pre-seed

Source: CAVI

Founders: ex NASA/JPL, ex Field AI

Why it’s cool:

Physical intelligence seem to be doing insanely well in the robotics SW/foundation model space, so knowing where to play in robotics/embodied intelligence is hard. But [REDACTED] have a special edge in so-called locomanipulation, meaning manipulating things from a moving platform. And even physical intelligence is using multiple models and fine-tuning on special things.

P-1.ai - Autonomous mechanical engineer

Status: Raised pre-seed

Source: CAVI

Founders: ex CTO of Airbus, ex Deepmind, ex Universe technologies

Why it’s cool:

A surprising amount of mechanical engineering work is digital today, mostly things like checking requirements, calculating stresses, running thermal or electrical simulations, etc. That means we can automate it and have agents do it for us. Paul and his team have been working on some interesting tech in the last couple of months. With their experience from running many large scale complex hardware engineering projects they should understand the customer.

💡 Ideas & Science

Top Value Added Chemicals from Biomass and Life support for long duration missions

The chart above is amazing. It was published in 2004 in a study to find alternatives to toxic or expensive to produce petroleum-based chemicals like adhesives, paint, etc. It’s also part of a 2021 presentation by John Hogan, Director of Bioengineering at NASA Ames Research Center on long duration life support - aka how to build a semi-permanent station on Mars.

Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory

I feel like I’m posting every new Dwarkesh podcast here, but they’re just so good compared to other long-form interviews! OK, sometimes they fall into the SF-AGI-tech-bro caricature, but more often than not, they keep a good balance between approaching the person and maintaining a grand view of their topic at hand. This interview is with long-time internet writer and thinker Gwern Branwen (pseudonym) and covers everything from predicting scaling laws, wikipedia editor culture in the 00’s to rabbitholes.

Bitcoin is worse is better

Now that bitcoin is nearing $100,000 a piece, it might be time to take a refresher on why bitcoin wins, from Gwern in 2011. Bitcoin is an example of “worse is better” in that it’s an inelegant design, horribly inefficient cryptographers said already back then, in fact, but it still survives other solutions.

Eliza and ai16z

Meanwhile in memecoin-land and on the list of amusing, frustrating and generally degenerate things: A large fund launches a framework for building conversational agents that connect to twitter and discord, ok, nice. Then the “community” launches a token for an instantiation of said framework, called “eliza”. Big fund proceeds to launch own token with a “fairer” distribution under “ELIZA”. eliza proceeds to tank in value and ELIZA has $80M market cap. The new memecoin farming strategy is to scrape github for any forks of the ai16z repo and then watch pump.fun for launches... Not financial advice, or even advice on what to spend your time on, honestly. This is the energy drink of your informational diet.

Only through organizing these types of events can we get to the important conversations with procurers, end-users and technical talent which is necessary to understand the space.

🤼 People

Jeffrey Saunders - CTO at National Defence Technology Center, Denmark

Colin MacLeod - CEO and Co-founder of Mutable tactics

Camilla Frost - COO at Normark Defence

Thomas Dybdahl Ahle - Head of ML at Normal Computing

This Friday I had the pleasure to moderate a panel with Jeff, Colin, Camilla and Thomas as part of the European Defense Tech Hackathon in Copenhagen. The hot topic was Navigating Defense Innovation: Building Strategic Capacity in the Nordics. We spanned the tactical perspective of mission autonomy startups, the procurement and innovation at a national level, broad-based strategic technologies like thermodynamic computing and how to enable collaboration between academia and private sector within defense.

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• RF/EE/AI superstar co-founder at EW-startup (dm for details)

• More

🚀 ”Not yet Companies” (top three teams of the hackathon)

Disclaimer: it was incredibly difficult to choose the best teams among these, and there were many who are incredibly talented and did interesting things during the hackathon we don’t mention here.

“Fight or Flight” - UAV identification protocol

Status: Prototype

Source: EDTH

Founders: Benjamin Gurini, Khrystyna Rozhenko, Moritz Holz, Martin Kistler

Why it’s cool:

A large minority of all drones shot down by Ukrainian forces are, in fact Ukrainian drones. That’s largely because of the fact that there’s no practical way to identify if a drone is a friend or foe. The team out of Munich set up a simple cryptographic protocol that is not easy to spoof by the enemy, doesn’t broadcast the position unnecessarily and is easy to implement using existing hardware.

AquaHub - UUV navigation through deployable

Status: Prototype

Source: EDTH

Founders: Filip Bąk, Wiktor Kurdek, Jędrzej Drozdowski

Why it’s cool:

Filip, Wiktor and Jędrzej already won another defense tech hackathon this year, and spun out an underwater charging station company out of Poland. A huge problem with longer range, autonomous solutions is that water is very good at absorbing or reflecting RF signals (light too for that matter). This makes GNSS useless for underwater vehicles. One solution we’ve seen on the Toloka UUV is a telescope with sensing equipment sticking out of the water, but that requires the vehicle to be close to the surface. Filip and team prototyped deployable buoys with a GPS module and a comms cable attached to the subsea vessel.

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Bruumbal - Autonomous swarming control of fly-by-fiber drones

Status: Prototype

Source: EDTH

Founders: Matus Bojnansky, David Hlavinka, Peter Zajac, Tomas Ondrejka, Mike Ondrejka

Why it’s cool:

Fiber optic drones are not entirely new technology, but neither is artillery. It seems to be very powerful and useful in Ukraine, where the spectrum is incredibly congested and constantly jammed. Detection systems are also increasingly abundant, making stealth ISR and one-way missions more difficult. The Bruumbal team of DTU students built out a system for autonomous control of a swarm of fiber-controlled drones, and ran Unity simulations on it.

💡 Ideas & Science

What’s the impact of AI on energy demand?

“Between 2010 and 2018, global data centre compute increased by more than 550%. Yet energy use in data centres increased by just 6%.⁵”

We know energy and sand (plus some other materials) are the necessary inputs to produce compute. But how much of the global energy goes to AI compute, aka how guilty should we feel for asking ChatGPT stupid questions, aka is the new “Flygskam” “GPTskam”? The numbers seem to say we’re fine. Data centers as a whole are pretty power hungry at around 1-2% of the total global energy consumption, but consider what we get for it! The entire digital world should surely be worth keeping alive and unrestricted! When looking at just AI-traceable data center use, it gets slightly trickier. Assuming the total NVIDIA servers produced in 2023 running at 100% as a proxy, we still don’t get to insane numbers, just 5-10TWh. That’s nothing compared to the 460 TWh of all data centers, transmission networks and crypto mining.

Related: Alien civilizations die from overheating because… thermodynamics

Found through Felix Neubeck’s excellent newsletter Deep Tech Demystified, this somewhat esoteric paper proposes that alien civilizations can’t reject enough heat from their planets and so after 1000 years or so of exponential growth get cooked. Unless they achieve sustainable extraplanetary life. With 1000 years you’d think we could get there… Or figure out a way to get rid of heat efficiently. (e.g., huge parasols, heat conducting space elevators or something).

Five protein-design questions that still challenge AI

We can design proteins and binders at a faster pace than ever before, but there are still some challenges unsolved by the current tooling. This Nature article outlines four key hurdles:

• Designing binders with the right functional outcomes

• Generating new catalysts outside of typical scaffolds

• Calculating effects from environmental factors on the designed proteins

• Extending the sophistication of designs to e.g., cellular transporters

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🤼 People

The whole Munich Defense Tech Ecosystem - at EDTH x Helsing Munich meetup

This week the European Defense Tech Hub (aka me and Benjamin Wolba) organized the first defense tech meetup in Munich. We had about 50 people show up, mostly technical people, with defense interest or already working in the space. Thanks to our partners at Helsing, we had space and food. About 10 startups also pitched their ideas (dm me for a full list ;))

💼 Portfolio jobs board

This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:

• Cryptography Engineer at Fabric Cryptography

• PM (protect) at Flashbots

• More

🚀 Companies

New Phase Metal - Rare earth magnets in the US

Status: Pre-Seed

Source: Network

Founders: Adam Powell, Artem Iurkovsky

Why it’s cool:

95% of neodymium magnets are produced in China today, and we are going to need a lot of them if we want to continue producing EVs and wind turbines and other electrical goods. New Phase wants to use a special recycling procedure called leaching-distillation which takes permanent magnet scraps and turns them into Nd.

[REDACTED] - 2D Materials manufacturing in the US

Status: Pre-Seed

Source: Network

Founders: Redacted

Why it’s cool:

We need to be able to produce 5G/6G and other tunable RF components efficiently in the US. Communications and connectivity are not yet solved, and chip manufacturing to enable the next wave thereof certainly isn’t!

💡 Ideas & Science

Principles by Ray Dalio

I think I first read it in 2018, but now re-reading it as a investor. Ray Dalio (founder and recurring CEO) of Bridgewater Associates lays out his principles for life and business. Principles are simple values, rules to live by and make decision making less cognitively straining. For example: “No Assholes!” is a great, simple rule when choosing who to work with.

Made in Germany

Germany used to be the hot bed of industrialization and productivity, but a combination of complacency, outsourcing of critical capacities to China, a political attack on nuclear and general state-nonsense has put us at the back. The best we can hope for now is a call for a re-election as the Chancellor Olaf Scholz realizes firing the Minister of Finance for pushing his parties’ agenda might be a symptom of something important…

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FrontierMath

How will we know when AI is good? Evals! Or benchmark tests on which to let loose Claude, GPT and others. This one is specifically checking how close to world class mathematics problem solving AI models are, by eval company EpochAI. Terence Tao is quoted to have said several problems may resist AIs for years to come. The best AI so far had a success rate of ~2%. To be fair, these are extremely hard problems.